How To Make Your Content Shareable – 8 Key Characteristics

If content creation resembled cooking, you’d be reading the following recipe for shareable content:

3 tablespoons of value + 4 tablespoons of visuals + 3 teaspoons of fiber and a sprinkle of emotions.

Fiber being ingredients such as bullet points that make content easy to digest.

In reality, however, creating content does not boil down to such a straightforward recipe. All these ingredients mentioned though do serve as pointers on a shareable checklist that guides you when you write content.

Let’s dive into each of these characteristics and see how they help attract shares:

The first layer of shareable content: it discusses something that solves the reader’s problem

Your content should have only one mission – addressing your audience’s concern. Content that solves a problem or discusses an issue that interests your audience is vital for attracting attention.

Let’s take one of the examples of shareable content. Nested Bean, a babies’ sleepwear company, produces content that solves its audience’s problem such as in this post, 10 Tips for Surviving the 4 Month Sleep Regression, which received 5k total shares according to Buzzsumo:

How can you find what interests your audience?

What do you do when selecting a gift for a rather picky friend? Ask her directly or ask someone who knows her choices closely.

Follow this tactic when preparing content for your audience. Ask your customers what troubles them or ask the customer service team (hint: someone who closely knows them) as it regularly solve their problems.

Alternatively, use tools such as Buzzsumo and Google Trends to learn what’s trending. Social listening can also help you understand what troubles or holds your audience’s attention. Quora and social media channels are great places to listen to your audience.

Once you get the key idea of what you want to write, use Answer The Public for ideas of how you can work on the topic.

Here are suggestions that Answer The Public made for my key topic of ‘shareable content’ for this post:

Now that you’re planning to solve a problem, focus on actually solving it

Just as having an idea and executing an idea are very different, picking up on what’s interesting and writing on it are different matters.

Content that gives a full-blown answer to the reader’s problem is more likely to get shares than content that makes a lazy attempt at offering value.

More value checks the utility box off the shareable checklist, which we’re going to discuss below.

Make sure your content is relatable for the reader

If you step down from your position as a content producer and step back into your reader’s shoes, you’ll understand why relatability is another pillar of shareable content.

You only share what you can relate to.

A very simple example – someone who is in love is more likely to share to lovey-dovey quotes as compared to someone who has recently wormed their way out of a breakup.

People also share content that they hope will add value to the life of their readers. A study by the NYT Insight Group highlighted that 94% of the individuals assessed the usefulness of the content before sharing it.

The underlying reason is simple – sharers want to share value with their audience.

On the #CMWorld the twitter chat, social media strategist, Caitlin Kinser, shared the following:

A1: Shareable content gives the sharer "social currency." In other words, it's beneficial for them to be sharing it because it improves others' view of them as helpful, insightful, interesting, funny, etc. People share content that makes them appear "cool." #CMWorld

Take into account the psychology of shareable content: utility, inspiration, entertainment

This indicates that you have to tap into neurology for producing share-worthy content. Three chief factors can help please the brain:

Utility: This refers to content that is useful. It helps solve problems such as, 5-Minute Crafts videos that are widely shared on Facebook.

Inspiration: Things that inspire us and poke at our curiosity and creativity also tend to increase motivation to share.

TED Talks are a great example. The following talk received a lot of social love in contrast with its companion videos on Twitter:

"Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life." @SusanDavid_PhDhttps://t.co/k30Id9YZuf

Note that the video addresses a very common issue – stress. And, it piques curiosity by insinuating what emotional courage can do for us. With the content it covers, the video scores well on both the utility and inspiration features of shareable content.

Entertainment: Entertainment is another factor explaining the psychology of shareable content.

But this one shouldn’t come off as a surprise considering BuzzFeed’s success with viral content is common news.

Any piece of content that encourages laughter or leaves the reader amused hits the share-worthy mark.

Berger also found that content, which elicited high-arousal emotions like excitement, astonishment, delight, frustration, anger, awe, excitement was shared more than low-arousal emotions such as sadness.

Stir some emotions as well. But which ones?

The psychology of shareable content makes it clear that tapping into the right emotions can earn social attention.

So which emotional chord should you strike? Joy? Sadness? Excitement?

Research published in the journal of Psychological Sciences, highlights that the answer is not so straightforward.

We may think that positive emotions such as happiness come under ways to create shareable content. That’s only partly right though. Because, strong negative emotions such as anxiety can also ante up shareability levels.

So, it must a strong emotion that encourages content sharing.

Alas, that’s not the answer as well because a strong emotion such as sadness can reduce the likelihood of sharing content.

Marco Guerini of Trento Rise and Jacopo Staiano of Sorbonne University studied 65,000 articles on two news sites to find the emotional pattern behind articles that went viral.

They noted that content, which aroused emotions within the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) model received the most social shares. In other words, individual emotions didn’t affect the social shares on the articles.

The VAD model is frequently used in psychology to sort emotions. As per this model, each emotion exhibits the following emotions:

Valence relates to the negativity or positivity of an emotion. Example, happiness has a positive valence and fear has a negative valence

Arousal refers to the excitement or relaxation incited. For instance, sadness is low-arousal, whereas, anger is a high-arousal emotion

Dominance that ranges between feeling in control and submission. Admiration is a high-dominance emotion but fear is a low-dominance emotion

As per this study, the articles that gained the most social shares were tied to high dominance feelings that made the reader feel in control such as admiration.

Folks over at Harvard Business Review dug deeper into the research. They concluded that “viral content tends to be surprising, emotionally complex, or extremely positive.”

Such an emotional blend is likely to be effective in driving home shares because it triggers the right combination of dominance and arousal.

Key takeaway

Keeping it simple, stir high dominance emotions with high-arousal emotions. Make sure that the content spreads positivity. If it has an element of surprise, bingo! More social shares.

In other words, strong emotions that evoke positivity and energy can result in higher share volumes.

Create engaging content to hold reader’s attention

Did you know that brightly colored flowers that attract bees as pollinators didn’t always have such engaging colors?

Fossils indicate that petals used to be a pale, dull yellow. With time, the colors evolved to become more bright and engaging for the bees. In other words, flowers grew to become more attractive for their audience, the bees.

You need to follow the same steps. Create engaging content that hooks readers because bland content won’t do.

The clickbait title you chose may get you a click, but it won’t hold your reader’s interest.

Moz and Buzzsumo paired up to examine 100,000 posts. They concluded that more than 50% of them got 2 or less Facebook interactions (likes, comments, or shares). Moreover, 75% of these articles had zero external links as shown below:

How do you engage your readers?

It takes a lot to write engaging posts with storytelling being the chief tool to hold attention. Besides, you need to sound like a human, draw up some analogies, and try to make the piece fun to read instead of boring.

Make your content readable so it is easy to consume

Even if your content is engaging and conversational, your reader will be instantly repelled if he meets a wall of words.

Long paragraphs, even longer sentences, and no reading breaks. Imagine yourself running through the field like that. No breaks to breathe or sip quaff some water. Would you make it to the end?

I wouldn’t. The reader wouldn’t either. So, you will have to make your content easy to consume to improve your visitor’s reading experience.

Content readability, how readable it is, is what makes quizzes, videos, and list-based articles shareable.

Moz’s study with Buzzsumo that we picked from above concludes that videos and list posts achieve high shares on average. They also shared, “entertainment videos and quizzes are far more likely to be shared than linked to.”